Now, a frightfully big amount of time has passed since then, and I notice that I still haven’t lived up to my promise of ’some grainy YouTube cinematography, and some mundane anecdotes’.

Guess what I have for you today. Go on, guess.

Well done. You guessed correctly. You’ve almost certainly seen the magical YouTube gizmo already, which is cheating I suppose but never mind. It’s a video.

You should watch it. Go on. Please. It’ll only take less than three minutes.

All very well and good, but what of the ‘and some mundane anecdotes’? Maybe those will come later, perhaps. Maybe I won’t bother. If you’re at all eager, please beg me, but I think I’ve forgotten most of everything by now actually. Sorry.

I think the video above tells some stories, to be fair. Doesn’t it? You don’t know, do you you? Because you didn’t watch it, and you need to change that right now. Or if you’ve already watched it, some parts didn’t quite sink in because it’s so overwhelmingly awesome, so you need to watch it again right now.

Because that this computer was made by an American man named Steve Gates, a lot of the people who are inside this computer and read this blog are American people. And I am very sure indeed that they will all firmly enjoy reading something about basketball. Fortunately, I have played some basketball recently (incidentally, I’m quite shitty at it, because basketball is a kind of sport), and I observed something. People often chuck the ball at the basket when they are a quite long way away from the basket, even though they nearly always don’t manage to get the ball into the basket and it just bounces away into the grubby hands of someone else. If they were to chuck the ball at the basket when closer to the basket, they would be much more successful.

It is rather a shame that I am not in a position to make use of what I have noticed. Maybe my lack of prowess is what blew the wool away from my eyes and turned me into the little boy from The Emperor’s New Clothes. Of course, I could always tell my more talented peers about my vision, as any sensible person would, but actually I couldn’t really. For starters, I don’t think people would pay much attention to advice pouring out of the mouth of someone who is not very good at playing basketball – they’re too blinkered to consider that maybe a lack of that distracting stuff, being good at playing basketball, is what is needed to be able to see the light. For the main course, allowing other people to become better at playing basketball will make the gap between them and I even bigger. And for pudding, there’s the fact that our basketball season is over now anyhow, not that that’s of much interest to anyone who isn’t (or even is) me.

There are, I think, many parallels between this overambitious throwing of balls through hoops and the world as a whole. Why is it that whenever there’s a fly buzzing around, defecating on the raspberry tart, being sick all over the sausages, rubbing its hands together (why is it that they rub their hands together? Oh, they’re cleaning themselves when they do that. And, incidentally, they’re feet rather than legs), I will nearly always attempt to squash it even though I know that it will manage to dart out of my way?

Sometimes I manage to squash a fly, when the fly is a particularly tipsy fly. But most flies have pretty robust innards, or just stick to ginger beer. Still, I lunge at every single fly, just in case it’s one of those alcohol-eating ones. Think of all the energy that’s wasted whenever I ambitiously wave my hand in the direction of a fly. It must be much more energy than I would use by calculating a fly’s drunkenness using my brain.

I’m sure there’s a philosophical point to be made here. Unfortunately, it needs to be made by a philosopher, and I’m not a philosopher, so there. Sorry.

All this would be ripe and juicy if I were Michael McIntyre, because if I were Michael McIntyre I’d be able to say it in a funny voice and the people of the world would find it funny. But I’m not Michael McIntyre, so I can’t say it in a funny voice. You’re right, Michael McIntyre’s not the only person ever who can do a funny voice, but any tiny grain of possibility dust of me doing one is gobbled up and farted into the bin by this being a blog rather than a podcast. Sorry.

Maybe, I thought, it’s some kind of trap. Maybe it’s loaded with anthrax. Maybe it’s loaded with gunpowder. Maybe it’s loaded with anthrax and gunpowder. I was unable to dismantle the pen to check because it was stuck together so tightly. A more paranoid person might decide that this meant that the naughty assassin had slyly glued together the pen’s components after loading it with anthrax, but not I. Obviously this sturdiness had been in place since the beginning of time, and was a sign that the pen couldn’t possibly be loaded with powdered evil. Maybe a villain had attempted to fill the pen with explosives, in order to injure someone else, and had grown frustrated, and decided to abandon it in my pencil case instead. Thank you very much, Mr Villain.

I thought that it would be a bad pen – few people would give away a good pen – but was pleasantly surprised. It wasn’t bad at all. There was plenty of ink in it, and apart from one or two suspicious signs of chewing – by no means sufficiently vicious to be off-putting, I’m sure – it was in good nick. Admittedly it seemed to be one of those cheap, nasty ballpoint pens given away in envelopes by charities – it didn’t have anything written on it, for some reason – but for such a pen it was surprisingly decent.

I decided that it was a present from one of my fans. Thank you very much, Mr Fan. Much appreciated. I might write something with it one day or something.

When I was more littler, pens with black ink in them were something of a rarity. I had dozens of blue pens but very few black ones. Fast-forward to the days just before the recent arrival of this mysterious pen in my pencil case, and things are the other way round. A blue pen is handy for underlining dates and titles, so it’s lucky that there’s a single, slightly broken Norwich and Peterborough Building Society one that I found underneath a municipal computer keyboard. Apart from that, it’s a sea of black.

The pen that sprouted up in my pencil case was blue. Finally, a perfect balance. I had struck a happy medium.

Then two blacks pen both ran out of ink, and I realised that I had left my other one at home. I had nothing but blue pens. Two blue pens. I like to use blue pens for underlining titles and dates, as I think I have already said, but for everything else it’s black. I was stranded. I had struck the happy medium, yes, but I’d gotten a little carried away with striking it and it had toppled over. The poor medium’s not so happy now, eh, is it? Not now there’s a massive boil on its head, the size of one of Susan Boyle’s cat’s furballs. Normally it is a good thing to find a pen, especially a blue one, especially so close to a tragic ink shortage. But not this time. I was forced to grit my teeth and use blue for everything. Although I did use a different blue pen for the underlining and the everything else, in the hope that maybe the inks were slightly different shades of blue.

The person who slipped the pen into my pencil case obviously wanted this to happen. Oh, the shame, the horror, and so on, all so unbearable. Perhaps they sucked all the ink out of the black pens, too – that’s very possible indeed, because those pens’ components are not quite so firmly screwed together.

I visited my dentist on Friday and because my dentist is near a shop that sells pens I went to a shop that sells pens and bought two pens just before going to my dentist. Not just any old pens, you understand, but Pilot V5 pens. That’s nice.

And just now, do you know what I did just now? A wee, but that’s irrelevant. The other thing I did just now is this: I finally managed to snap that mysterious pen open using my powerful brutish naked hands, and found no anthrax or anything like that, and removed the inner… cartridge, and used it to replace the inner cartridge of one of the black pens that ran out. So now I’ve got what looks like a black ballpoint pen but is in fact a blue one. That makes me like very totally insanely cool indeed, of course. Doesn’t it?

And now what I plan to do is this: the next time I encounter a pencil case, I will pretend to consider placing the pretend black pen in the pencil case, just in case the pencil case belongs to the scoundrel who put that pen in my pencil case. And if it’s not the right person’s pencil case, then it will simply be a philanthropic deed guaranteed to book me a place in heaven where I will be able to hobnob with baby Jesus when I am dead. I won’t actually do that thing, because that would be taking this too far, and also pens don’t grow on trees and stuff, but it is great fun to juggle with the idea and to prod it with a rod.

And actually, I won’t rule it out. Maybe it will happen. Because I want to create tension and excitement. Will he, won’t he? It will be thoroughly gripping.

No, I really don’t want to go through the hassle and pen loss of putting the pen into a pencil case. So I will right now categorically state that I firmly will be doing the thing. Because apparently it is more funny if I do a U-turn, and also because a U-turn is likely to make David Cameron angry with me, which is likely to be famous, and of course I want to be famous because I am a young person and every young person yearns for famousnessosity. It would probably be a lot easier if I kept away from pencil cases.

I was walking [my pet dog] and feeling quite happy about the day and all the things I’d got done when I felt like a shaft of light from Jesus’ big torch had shown me the way. I realised that getting work done and looking after yourself is nowhere near as enjoyable and satisfying than getting beered. Then something else hit me. It was a half full can of booze.

The same thing happened to me on Thursday. I was walking along, going about my business, after having been to the toilet I think, when all of a sudden a smallish plastic bottle of fruit juice smacked me in the face (shortly followed by an apology, and assurances that it was an accident – apparently the drink had been thrown by an unsuccessful juggler, or something). I was mildly amused by the fact that I should be hit by it not long after hearing Legge talk about a very similar incident of his own.

It’s not a very good story. Unlike Legge’s, it is not enhanced by an alarming collection of adjacent stories involving homeless people. Unlike Legge, I was not thinking about fruit juice. One member of the group of people looked a bit like a very bad drawing of Stephen Fry, which I suppose improves the story a little, but it’s still a bit pathetic.

One glimmer of interest: upon hearing Legge’s story, I was frustrated to not be told whether or not Legge went on to drink the alcohol. Did the contents make him wet? He does seem to suggest that the homeless man did not get the can back, and may perhaps have been irritated to have wasted some precious refreshment. I can report that in my case, the mostly-empty bottle was picked up again by the chaps who threw it. If they had allowed me to have the bottle, it would have been a nice way of saying sorry, but that didn’t happen.

Don’t worry. This is not the damp squib for which you are looking. Like Legge, I have some more material to spice things up, revolving around a key theme – in my case, slightly amusing anecdotes that could perhaps be from some kind of (quite bad) sitcom.

On Friday, I spent an hour pretending to do exercise but actually just headbutting a mat. Later, I ate some couscous whilst sitting on a chair. Not quite an armchair, but almost. Recently, a lady was paid some money to make a marvellous cover for the chair and its twin. When I ate the couscous, I spilt some of it on the chair. It took around 15 minutes for me to flick every grain of couscous from the chair. Fortunately it didn’t leave a stain. It’s a bit of a shame that the cover wasn’t new enough for the event to be particularly tragic or even, just maybe, with a considerable pinch of squinting, amusing.

I didn’t just eat couscous. There was some turkey too. It was suggested that I cut the turkey into small pieces, to make eating it easier, but I bullishly ignored that advice. This, I said, was on the grounds that people like Gillian McKeith recommend eating slowly and chew thoroughly so that you are aware of having eaten enough food. However, I think I also subconsciously decided that having to slice turkey fillets in front of a television with the plate resting on my thighs would increase the potential for amusing

I also ate some couscous yesterday, in the same chair. There was considerably less spillage this time. A few roguish specks of the wheat-based foodstuff did venture on to my clothes, but that was as far as the chaos went. I’m improving at this stuff, which in a way is a good thing.

What else? On Monday, I sort of almost fell off a chair, and stuff, but I can’t really remember what happened and I’m far too worried that it won’t turn out to be very interesting. Maybe, if you ask very nicely indeed, I will tell you about it when you’re a grown-up.

Well, why not? Pears have a hard life. In the United Kingdom and Australasia, the metaphorical term ‘pear-shaped’ can refer to something that has gone wrong (it’s thought to be from where the phrase ‘tits-up’ is derived). When applied to people, the term can mean ‘wide at the hips’, which may be negative. Obviously there some the positive meanings – ladies with wide hips are associated with fertility, and were frequently portrayed in certain prehistoric statuettes – and neutral ones – horticulturalist Alan Van Dyke coined the phrase in 1731, when he compared the shape of the cashew and the avocado to that of a pear – but there’s still no denying that pears have a miserable time.

Of course, I was wrong. My father doesn’t give a toss about the plight of an an edible pomaceous fruit. He was just breathing noisily.

When I was still little, there was a time when a cousin of mine and I argued over the identity of a plastic figurine (Playmobil). ‘It’s a duck,’ said my cousin. ‘It’s a cow,’ said I. How could it possibly be a duck? It had four legs and no beak. Has this lad, the son of a farmer, ever seen a duck? What a div. You couldn’t make it up.

Then it struck me. It was a dog. He was saying ‘it’s a dog’. And he was right.

Recently, my science teacher said something along the lines of this:

Remember, there are many different types of bond – intermolecular, covalent, James. Don’t just say ‘strong bonds’ or you’ll be Doctor Mark.

And I thought this:

Who the hell is Doctor Mark?

Is he some kind of byword for problems? You know, a bit like Gordon Bennett. Maybe being ‘Doctor Mark’ is like having ‘gone pear-shaped’.

Then it struck me. Everything became clear. It was as though a lightbulb had been lifted from my head. As quick-witted readers will have guessed, my science teacher meant ‘docked a mark’.

All was well. I was able to understand my science teacher. It was a leap forward. But then he went and mentioned a person who had obtained a doctoral degree. I will not continue with this, because it would be tedious; and besides, my head has kind of exploded.

I’m not going to bang on about it. I don’t think either side is right. I’m too tired to care at the moment. I’m also not going to point out that Lily Allen seems to be encouraging use to use the service called Spotify (it lets us ‘access music without having to rip someone off’), and yet Lily Allen also seems to be saying that Spotify gives musicians no money.

If I mentioned it too much, it would be comically living up to the stereotype of the blogosphere – the idea of every web publisher thinking that everybody else totally gives a toss about what they think. Why would you want to get my extremely non-unique perspective? Haven’t you got better things to do?

But it annoys me that the archaic ‘you wouldn’t walk into a shop and steal a pineapple’ argument is still being wheeled out over and over again. The number of pineapples in the world is limited to how many have been grown and picked, each at some expense. When you steal a pineapple, there is one less pineapple in the shop. When you ‘steal’ a music, the ’shop’ from which you have taken that music is no worse off than it would be if you achieved your status as someone who didn’t buy that music by simply walking past the pile of musics. In the magical digital age, the people who make music do more or less the same amount of work whether there are seven or seven million copies of the same audio file. That’s how this stuff works, remember?

Obviously people know that. I’m not that big a patroniser. But they don’t think about it, evidently. I’m just pointing it in case it will help them to remember to think about it.

This is, as you may have noticed, absolutely not big aggregation, or a meaty summing-up. It’s too much of a hairy minefield and I am not the man for the job. Sorry about that. It’s not the whole jigsaw puzzle, just a little jigsaw piece that has slipped underneath the sofa. But do things make a bit more sense now you can see the hippopotamus’s face? It’s no longer a rhino that’s walked into a tapestry.

Of course, such technology is notoriously shit, which lends a whole new dimension to the experience. I think these young people would enjoy reading a lot more if books were translated into a foreign language, and then back into English, by Google’s hungry elves.

I know, I’m not the first person to have noticed that. Sorry.

Anyhow, that’s my roundabout way of introducing the following quote, taken from the Google-translated version of an Orden des Leibowitz article, which happens to be a bit poignant and relevant to what I want to talk about one day in this article when I eventually manage to get around to it.

Here it should also go back, so I put the new sails and a little cleaned up. The new theme with the beautiful name of Old Popular Yolk I find not only very clear and readable, it contains no bells and whistles that distract from the real meaning of a blog.

That’s not the quote I’m looking for. Did I simply include it because I’m a self-aggrandizing twit? Maybe. But never mind that, here’s what I’m trying to point at:

Also gone overboard is the Google advertising and less visible to Google Analytics, and the dissemination of the RSS feeds via Feedburner. The Feedburner feed is still active, so that all subscribers will continue to be supplied, here on the blog but there is only the standard feed of WordPress. Why does it work? It’s easy, just like the blog, I also wanted to free myself from all useless. This includes, for me, just the most Optimierungswahn and the hunt for more digits in the numerator of the RSS feeds. For preparing in my personal blog retrospect, I discovered that my blog has the most fun when I was sheared at this stuff even one iota. So to hell with all the statistics and optimization, in here is again blogged in the sense of the good old Web 1.0.

I think that’s a good point. Does being too analytical make blogging worse?

Every month, when I was a younger man, I would write a long, self-indulgent article listing all the dull facts and figures related to this blog. I would hide under the veil of admitting that it was an annoying to do, and then go and do it anyway. Those were the days.

I am a slightly less young man now. Do I still write a long, self-indulgent article, listing all the dull facts and figures related to this blog, every month? Or do I stop? It’s a difficult question to answer.

I’m going to write such an article now, in a way. So ‘yes’ to the first question. But also ‘yes’ to the second question, because it won’t be such a regular thing. Prunes are expensive these days, you know.

Things are going well, and the old server is rarely allowed to be lazy these days. This blog’s rushed, temporary design found its way onto a list of nice-looking websites, sticking out like a sore thumb in a list of okay fingers. (The list’s author’s name is Cameron Chapman, a name that I have seen before and incorrectly thought of as belonging to a man. Not because I am some kind of old-fashioned, sexist colonel – well, maybe that as well – but because I think of Cameron as a boys’ name. Besides, her surname contains the word ‘man’. And ‘chap’. So confusing.)

There was also hype on We Love WP and welovetxp.com. Although the latter’s screenshots are better-quality, and although we must never forget how that website was responsible for a tiny picture of this website appearing in a magazine, this website simply isn’t powered by Texpattern. Idiots! But thanks for the traffic.

I have nothing else to report, really. Um…

From next week, I’ll be sticking to a regular schedule, which is something to look forward to. Say goodbye to the misery of wondering when the next article will be. Say hello to knowing that I’ll publish something every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Probably.

As I predicted, this design does seem to be changing a lot. And as I also predicted, that’s okay. Nice manly pinkish blues at the moment.

To help get you in the mood, here are two videos that I made when it was even colder than it is now. The idea is that by experiencing some coldness that is slightly closer to severity, one can start to find the current situation even less distressing.

On the first day of February, I wasn’t killed by some undercooked chickpeas. Later, a cousin of mine and I decided to use a piece of equipment designed for use at the seaside to do an activity that is far less difficult when the floor is covered with snow. The lack of snow did not put us off. I made a video about it.

Before that fun day in February – on the tenth day of January, to be precise – I went in a car. I made a video about it, and it hit the internet towards the end of that month. But I am not cheating here, because today I decided to improve it – the result is, among other things, slightly shorter than before, yet somehow even better.

1. The man who lives in the house next to the house in which I live does a cough. It is no ordinary cough that he does – it is several coughs rolled into one, and it sounds a little bit like he’s being attacked by a bird. He probably isn’t though. It’s just one humdinger of a cough – dinging hums with such aplomb that it’s like the man’s sitting next to me, even though in actual fact we are separated by several metres and a fence and a large hedge and a bicycle shed and several more metres.

   I am not the only person who hears the man’s cough. The man’s life-partner hears it too. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asks the man. Not a word about the cough. It’s as if just suddenly offering to make some tea is what everybody instantly does upon hearing their life-partner do a cough.

   I am forced to wonder whether the man coughs alarmingly every time he would like a cup of tea. It’s some kind of secret code – he probably sneezes every time he fancies a coffee, too, and so on. But what’s wrong with simply asking to be given a cup of tea? It seems very strange to me.

   I don’t really like tea, anyway. It’s too hot and wet. It improves when diluted with milk, with obscene lashings sugar dissolved in it, but when you get to that stage you might as well just drink some milk and eat some sugar – faffing around with teabags is an unnecessary distraction. But I need to open my mind, to become less solipsistic. Just because I don’t like tea doesn’t mean nobody does.

   That wasn’t a very promising situation, and although the anecdote fulfilled most of the promises there weren’t enough promises to fulfil. The situation was as susceptible to being milked as oats are. And don’t even think about waving some oat milk in my face, saying that it is proof that oats can be milked. Oat milk is made by soaking oats in water. It’s a shame that you can’t soak situations in water. Let’s hope the second anecdote will be a tad better. Being a tad better than that is hardly ambitious, I must say.

2. It is the morning. Only just the morning, but still the morning. I chisel myself out of bed and go downstairs. Nothing unusual about that.

   I notice that on the floor of downstairs there is a piece of paper. Nothing usual about that. Why the hell is there a piece of paper on the floor?

   Maybe there is a hole in the floor, on the other side of which lies a parallel universe. The piece of paper is there so that I do not put my foot through the hole by accident – it could easily happen, because there’s not a great deal of visual contrast between the dark floor and the dark shadows that one might find in a hole. I applaud whoever helpfully put that piece of paper there, because parallel universes are not nice places – full of scary foot-eating monsters who look like members of the British National Party.

   But it’s a small piece of paper, and if it’s concealing a hole then the hole must be a small one – so small that I could never put my foot through it. We are dealing with a possibility so small that a million copies of it could hide quite comfortably underneath the piece of paper.

   What would make the person in charge of magical portals decide to put a magical portal in my dining room, when there are so many other great places where a magical portal would be warmly welcomed, anyway? It’s severely arrogant of me to suggest that my dining room would be chosen as the place to place such a rare spectacle, out of all of the millions of possible locations in the world.

   I eventually decide that the piece of paper has blown onto the ground. I bend over and pick it up. I look at the side of the piece of paper that was facing the ground. On it has been written some writing by my mother, using an enormous heavy-duty pen. It tells me that my father and she have gone out.

   I dance around with happiness, like the child of an frog and John Sergeant. Woot, as the kids say. I have the house to myself. I can lie in the empty bathtub, fully clothed, eating ice cream. I can lie in a hammock made by glueing a curtain to the ceiling with bull sperm, eating ice cream. I can even do something that involves neither eating ice cream nor lying. Fancy that!

   But I hear a shuffling noise. It tells me that I do not have the house to myself. The parents are still present. It is fortunate that I hear the shuffling noise before I prepare to launch into a frenzy of ice cream eating – if I had not, the consequences would have been unimaginably terrible.

   Why did they write a note, explaining their absence, when they clearly are not absent? Is it a plan to embarrass me by catching me behaving as anyone does when out of the evil hands of having to behave ordinarily when in the company of other human beings? Probably not. They probably changed their minds about going out. Or went out and came back in quickly. The note could have simply been written a long time ago, hence its being on the floor (the first step on a terrifying journey in the direction of the recycling bin). But I like to imagine that it is part of an evil conspiracy. It is a shame that my imagination is too unimaginative for me to be able to use it to imagine many possible exciting evil conspiracies of which it could be part, but never mind.

I don’t think that either of those were particularly interesting. But since when was interestingness the point of this thing? I’ve got to say that – otherwise, I’ve been doing this so wrongly.

I present to you just four of my snaps. There are more, and some of them are decent too, but I am limited by being a little bit anxious about people’s faces appearing here, not wanting to display several photographs of the same thing, my slightly broken SD card, and other things. Four is more than enough – well, it is for the time being, anyhow. It is certainly the case that I’m a bit weird, filling my blog with photographs taken using a sweat-cheap and increasingly-broken Tesco camera.

One jolly evening was spent playing games, eating burnt meat, and singing songs by Robert Allen Zimmerman (Google him – he’s more famous than you think).

I can’t bear dogs. So naturally, there was a dog staying with us. Now I can bear dogs a bit more. This one was a bit mad, and ate plastic. In fact, screw the past tense, I’m sure he still is a bit mad. But probably less mad now – a decline perhaps partially down to our influence.

Relevant stuff that’s coming up: some grainy YouTube cinematography, and some mundane anecdotes. Irrelevant stuff that’s coming up: everything else. Don’t worry, I’ll try to stop this from being too much of a non-stop travelogue. I do do other things. For example… well, I’m not going to tell you, because telling you would ruin the surprise.